Acceptance

I'm sick! What started out as a slight scratchy throat on Monday night/Tuesday morning, what I hoped was merely weather-related sinus stuff, apparently is the real deal - sickness. More than likely it is a viral bug. Very few athletes are good about acceptance when it comes to illness or injury. Typically I tend to move rather quickly out of awareness and acceptance into denial.

This time, however, I decided to do things differently - in part from my reading of Eckhart Tolle's book "A New Earth". Eckhart describes "awakened doing" as the alignment of your outer purpose--what you do--with your inner purpose--awakening and staying awake. He uses three modalities to describe the ways in which you can align your your consciousness so that it is not what you do, but how you do what you do that becomes the primary focus.

The three modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm. Eckhart says the following: "You need to be vigilant to make sure that one of them operates whenever you are engaged in doing anything at all--from the most simple task to the most complex. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others."

It's pretty clear that I don't enjoy being sick. I'm not enthusiastic about being sick. So that leaves the modality of acceptance for me to step into while I recover. Thinking about it, I must acknowledge that I have brought suffering upon myself or others by my stubborn refusal to accept injury or illness.

Here's how acceptance has looked so far this week:

Monday - I accepted that I was

a) either tired from the weekend, or b) coming down with something. I elected to skip all of my workouts on Monday (the morning swim and the evening ride on the trainer).

Tuesday - accepted (with some degree of reluctance) that I was, in fact, probably getting sick.
I decided that to do my Monday interval swim workout with the 10 x50 yd repeats @ VO2 Max pace, 3 x200 yd repeats @ INT AT pace, 300 yds of kicking drills, etc. was not a wise plan.

I opted instead to do my Thursday swim workout (longer, slower repeats of 500 yds @ EXT AT pace with no particular attempt to hit my times for those repeats). I just settled into swimming at a pace where my body did not feel like it was exerting too much. Much to my surprise I hit the times for the two 500's only a few seconds off pace. Let me see if I have this right, I swam easier/slower which resulted in almost as fast as my regular 500 yd pace. Hmmm... And I enjoyed this swim workout even though I'm sick and it wasn't the scheduled workout.

Tuesday evening - I accepted that I wasn't feeling well enough to run outside with my training partners. I skipped the run entirely and had a nice warm bowl of soup instead. I enjoyed the soup. I wasn't enthusiastic about the soup, but I enjoyed it. The warmth felt soothing on my throat.

Wednesday morning - I called my running partner at 5:00 AM to say I would not be meeting her. I settled back in under the warm covers, and after some coughing, managing to drift back to sleep for a bit. I enjoyed the warmth and the taking care of myself.

I slipped slightly out of "acceptance mode" into "envy mode" when I read AJ's blog about her great brick workout this morning. I found myself wishing that I could have had that experience of a great workout this morning.

Then I realized that acceptance of being sick is what allows me to experience the other two areas Eckhart mentions - enjoyment and enthusiasm. Part of what reminds me of how much I enjoy my training and sports (marathons or triathlons) and how enthusiastic I am about participating, is a taste of what it is to not be able to participate, even if only for a few days.

A new level of acceptance awaits me. I'm ok with being sick for two days. I can accept being sick for two days. Tomorrow is the third day. I have a 1/2 marathon scheduled for Saturday.